College prep is a serious business, especially in the US. However, only one in four students score college-ready on the ACT (The ACT is a standardized test used for college admissions in the United States)

For low-income and minority students, the gap is even worse. It’s a market that was ripe for innovation, which is where Louisiana HQ-d MasteryPrep came in and then delivered in spades.

MasteryPrep realized that commercial test prep was built for and is focused on reaching out solely to students of a higher socioeconomic background. Before testing was mandated, the only students test prep catered to were those who had the means to invest in preparing for the ACT.

Now all students are taking the test, and the disparity is significant. Before MasteryPrep developed its mission to serve underprivileged students, no one was offering an ACT prep service for the majority of test takers.

Since its foundation, MasteryPrep has become renowned as an ideal programme for Principals and Administrators who want to provide the best test preparation for these under-served students.

The results speak for themselves. MasteryPrep has recently been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the country by both the Fortune 5000 and Inc 5000. Hundreds of teachers now have the tools they need to help thousands of students excel on the ACT and beyond.

The company has a clear ethos – make education an amazing experience for everyone. In order to deliver on this, MasteryPrephas a strategic business priority to deliver, measure and enhance its customer experience.

Jillian Musso, School Support Manager for MasteryPrep: “We have always prided ourselves on our customer centricity; in the past we have used direct customer feedback to feed into our product development. But as we have scaled it’s become harder to get regular and timely insight. We would get good feedback from an NPS (Net Promoter Score) blast survey whenever we signed a new account, but we felt it wasn’t enough – we needed a way to track how our customers were feeling in real time.”

After a full market review, MasteryPrep chose Customer Thermometer. The company has developed an innovative 1-click email feedback solution, which is helping the world’s most customer-obsessed businesses get quick and accurate feedback from their customers in just seconds.

As Customer Thermometer partners with email, helpdesks, CRM and Professional Services Automation providers, including Salesforce, Microsoft, Zendesk, ServiceNow and ConnectWise, its surveys can be delivered through email inboxes, which makes them easy to send and engaging for customers to complete. This enables businesses to get traffic-light feedback from every customer interaction, which helps them identify issues and maximize retention.

Musso continues: “We loved the Customer Thermometer proposition – it’s so simple and powerful – a really fun way to get insight. The installation was very easy and the feedback from teachers has been great. Plus, should we ever get a ‘red light’ following an email it’s meant that we can resolve the issue in real-time, which makes all the difference and enables us to get valuable learnings.”

A key output for MasteryPrep from using Customer Thermometer has been a boost in staff morale. ‘Gold stars’ are celebrated across the teams and staff are rewarded.

It’s also proved invaluable as a way to measure school boot-camps, which is a training event that MasteryPrep run whenever it signs a contract with a new school. The feedback following these events is crucial to ensure MasteryPrep starts every new customer engagement on the front foot and so it can repeat the aspects that were best-received.

Musso concludes: “We enjoy a fantastic working relationship with Customer Thermometer – the team is very responsive and helpful. But by far the best aspect is that it’s given our team access to true metrics that make a tangible difference to our business. No longer do we have to rely on gut feeling about whether we are doing a good job – every week at our team meeting we can deliver a true picture and celebrate successes. Customer Thermometer takes out the guesswork and makes everything better and transparent; it’s our currency of customer feedback.”

Our sincere thanks to Jillian and the whole MasteryPrep team for their generous time in creating this case study.

If you’d like to measure feedback like MasteryPrep, get a free Customer Thermometer account today: